


John

by DontBeDead



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:49:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DontBeDead/pseuds/DontBeDead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's descent into madness after Sherlock's fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	John

_Inspired by the song Atrophy- The Antlers._

The sound drags on endlessly, it never stops. A buzzing that carries on, static in my head. It’s always like that now, you know.

Though, I suppose you don’t. Not anymore.

Sometimes I wish I was as wrong about this as you thought I was about everything else. But wishes are just curses for those too weak to cope.

You took my life that first day in St Bart’s and moulded it around you, twisted it and changed it until you were the sun at the centre of my universe. Then you dropped out of the sky and I had to watch you bleed while I slowly freeze from the inside.

You would have laughed at me for that, wouldn’t you, Sherlock?

Sentiment, you would have scoffed, not even looking up from your microscope. You never understood.

But I do. I tried to teach you, I really did. I wrote it out in words I hoped you’d understand, but my audience never listened. You never listened.

Instead you threw yourself off a building and I had to watch you bleed.

Everything is dull now, everything silent. It all buzzes passed and can’t make sense of any of it.  People become bodies of flesh on the pavement, words just become background noise. You’re all I see any more, around every corner, in my armchair, never leaving. And I never want you to. I hate the silence, the ringing in my head, but it’s the only way you’ll speak to me.

You always tell me things you never said, even in the memories. You go off-script and I hate it when you do that. You tell me to sleep when that was my line, you tell me to rest, to think, to be better. But I never told you to be better.

It hurts that you think I should.

Strange, isn’t it. Getting hurt by someone who’s dead.

Because that’s all you are now. Dead. Expired. No longer among us. I hate it when they say that. It’s not true.

I’m the one that’s not among them, hovering at the fringes of the scene like a fading ghost, too consumed by grief to live the life you no longer can.

In my dreams, it happens in a park. I hate those dreams because I know that when you stand up, it will never be real. You’ll stay dead when I wake up.  I’ve never seen this park before, but it reminds me of Dartmoor and the sadness in your eyes when you told me you didn’t have friends.

I sometimes wonder how lonely you had been before me. If you were still lonely, even with me around. I think you were, Sherlock. You were so lonely but you hid it behind your brilliance and grace and your high-collared coat, and you never let anyone see.

I saw, as you spread your wings and fell. I wonder if you meant to fly that day at Bart’s, to prove that you weren’t a freak like they all said.

I believe you, don’t worry.

And sometimes I think that was your downfall. Did you ever really think that perhaps I was Moriarty? Not really him, because he died along with you on that day, but did you ever think that maybe I was as destructive as him?

You always hated distraction, something other than your work. You despised anything that led you away from the clues, the work, the cases. I was one of those things and I wormed my way into your life, distracted you, made you think that the cases weren’t everything.

I assumed you needed me and that was inevitably the thing that made you jump.

Nobody understands why I’m so far away, why I can’t see them anymore. Because I’m screaming for you constantly, working myself hoarse while you say goodbye over and over.

Goodbye, John.

That’s what you said, like it was enough. I’m a fake, he was right. No.

No.

I refuse to believe that. You were more than the lies Jim Moriarty spun. You were more than the number of cases you solved. You were more than the deductions.

You are more than any human being I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing.

The buzzing noise is constantly there, ignored by all those who can't handle it and hated by those who can, twisted and spinning inside my head, flowing like your blood does when your head hit the ground.

Did. When you did hit the ground.

Because you've gone and done it, thrown yourself from a building. It's not something that will happen.

It has. And I can never stop it, no matter how fast I ran and how hard I scream.

I'm a stranger in this place, completely lost and alone. I don’t recognise any of it anymore, not without that shine you added. Now it's nothing but a broken skeleton of a city I once loved.

Like I'm the broken skeleton of a man I once was.

Why did you do this to me, Sherlock?

You're all I think about anymore. Everything else is transport.

Right? That's what you said. Transport.

I'm stuck in a desert where you were the rain, starved of you and drowning in the grit and the sand. It presses in around me, floods my ears and mouth, suffocates me slowly.

And I don't even fight it.


End file.
